In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the myth of the noble savage refers to a stock character who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the "noble" savage symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive people living in harmony with nature."The noble savage", Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory Third Edition (1991) J.A. Cudon, Ed. pp. 588–589. In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), the English playwright John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.
The intellectual politics of the Stuart Restoration (1660–1688) expanded Dryden's playwright usage of savage to denote a human wild beast and a wild man.OED s.v. "savage" B.3.a. Concerning civility and incivility, in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699), the philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, said that men and women possess an innate morality, a sense of right and wrong conduct, which is based upon the intellect and the emotions, and not based upon religious doctrine.
In 18th-century anthropology, the term noble savage then denoted nature's gentleman, an ideal man born from the sentimentalism of moral sense theory. In the 19th century, in the essay "The Noble Savage" (1853), Charles Dickens rendered the noble savage into a rhetorical oxymoron by satirizing the British romanticisation of Primitivism in philosophy and in the arts made possible by moral sentimentalism.Moore, Grace. "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'", The Dickensian 98:458 (2002): 236–243.
In many ways, the myth of the noble savage entails fantasies about the non-West that cut to the core of the conversation in the social sciences about Orientalism, colonialism and exoticism. One question that emerges is whether an admiration of "the Other" as noble undermines or reproduces the dominant hierarchy, whereby the Other is subjugated by Western powers.
Origins
The Roman historian Tacitus' description of ancient Germanic people in his 98 AD work De origine et situ Germanorum (On the Origin and Situation of the Germans) is an early iteration of the noble savage narrative.Hall, Anja. Paradies auf Erden?: Mythenbildung als Form von Fremdwahrnehmung: der Südsee-Mythos in Schlüsselphasen der deutschen Literatur. Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. p. 0000. The Germanic population is positioned as a foil for Tacitus' Roman readers, who were in the corrupt and decaying phase of their Empire. Teutonic life is described as more virtuous and virile.Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism. Columbia University Press, 1928. Tacitus' depiction is similar to Julius Caesar's in Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Gallic War, c. 46 BC).Lovejoy, Arthur O. and George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. New York: Octagon Books, 1935. 362–6. "Thus with their virtue protected they live uncorrupted by the allurements of public shows or the stimulant of feastings. Clandestine correspondence is equally unknown to men and women. Very rare for so numerous a population is adultery [...] No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.Tacitus, Cornelius. The Agricola and Germany of Tacitus. Macmillan, 1868. 13f.
Ibn Tufail's 1160 Andalusian novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (The Living Son of the Vigilant) explores the subject of natural theology as a means to understand the material world. The protagonist is a wild man isolated from his society, whose rustic life in harmony with Mother Nature leads him to knowledge of Allah.Attar, Samar, The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought (1989), Lexington Books, .Al-Dabbagh, Abdulla. Literary Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Universalism. Austria, Peter Lang, 2010. 5.
The 14th century Byzantine philosopher Theodore Metochites attempted to explain the loss of Asia Minor during the Ottoman conquests by going back to the work of Tacitus. He related the idea that the "Schythians" (mainly referring to Germanic, Turkic and Mongolic peoples) were more virtuous, as they were numerous, bellicose, and unsubjugated. He claimed that was because they lived a nomadic and simple life, free of material concerns. Historian Speros Vryonis criticised this view as oversimplified, as it ignores the fact that nomadic groups possessed certain crafts, engaged in commerce and marginal agriculture, and continuously interacted with settled peoples in symbiotic relationships.Vryonis, Speros (1971). The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamisation from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. Berkeley: California University Press. pp. 410-412
Metochites is praising the “‘noble savage’’, who living close to nature is free of the artificialities of urban life which so pervert human character. [...] Metochites similarly converted Scythian barbarity into a state of moral purity so that using it as a foil he might attack the shortcomings of his own society. [...] The parallel between Metochites and Tacitus on this one point is striking. They are both moralizing and use the noble savage as a literary device to this end.
The stock character of the noble savage appears in the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), about the Tupinambá people of Brazil, wherein the philosopher Michel de Montaigne presents "Nature's Gentleman", the bon sauvage counterpart to civilized Europeans in the 16th century.
The first usage of the term noble savage in English literature occurs in John Dryden's stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), about the troubled love of the hero Almanzor and the Moorish beauty Almahide, in which the protagonist defends his life as a free man by denying a prince's right to put him to death, because he is not a subject of the prince:
By the 18th century, Montaigne's predecessor to the noble savage, nature's gentleman was a stock character usual to the sentimental literature of the time, for which a type of non-European Other became a background character for European stories about adventurous Europeans in the strange lands beyond continental Europe. For the novels, the opera, and the stageplays, the stock of characters included the "Virtuous Milkmaid" and the "Servant-More-Clever-Than-the-Master" (e.g. Sancho Panza and Figaro), literary characters who personify the moral superiority of working-class people in the fictional world of the story.
In English literature, British North America was the geographic locus classicus for adventure and exploration stories about European encounters with the noble savage natives, such as the historical novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), by James Fenimore Cooper, and the epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both literary works presented the primitivism (geographic, cultural, political) of North America as an ideal place for the European man to commune with Nature, far from the artifice of civilisation.
Cultural stereotype Kingdom of Spain The mytheme of the savage was a helpful justification for colonization by Europeans.Borsboom, Ad. "The savage in european social thought; A prelude to the conceptualization of the divergent peoples and cultures of Australia and Oceania". Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 144.4 (1988): 419. The conquistador mistreatment of indigenous people in Viceroyalty of New Spain eventually prompted recriminations in both Europe and North America. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas was particularly horrified by conquistador tactics as well as their failure to teach Christianity to their captives. Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of the Natural Man: the American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology. Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies. Cambridge University Press, 1982. At the Valladolid debate of 1550–1 about the enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish colonies, Bishop de las Casas argued that the pre-conquest native Americans embodied Aristotle's description of a true civil society.
Kingdom of France In the intellectual debates of the late 16th and 17th centuries, philosophers used the racist stereotypes of the savage and the good savage as moral reproaches of the European monarchies fighting the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). In the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), Michel de Montaigne reported that the Tupinambá people of Brazil ceremoniously eat the bodies of their dead enemies, as a matter of honour, whilst reminding the European reader that such wild man behavior was analogous to the religious barbarism of burning at the stake: "One calls ‘barbarism’ whatever he is not accustomed to."Essay "Of Cannibals" The academic Terence Cave further explains Montaigne's point of moral philosophy:
As philosophic reportage, "Of Cannibals" applies cultural relativism to compare the civilized European to the uncivilized noble savage. Montaigne's anthropological report about cannibalism in Brazil indicated that the Tupinambá people were neither a noble nor an exceptionally good folk, yet neither were the Tupinambá culturally or morally inferior to his contemporary, 16th-century European civilization. From the perspective of Classical liberalism of Montaigne's humanist portrayal of the customs of honor of the Tupinambá people indicates Western philosophic recognition that people are people, despite their different customs, traditions, and codes of honor. The academic David El Kenz explicates Montaigne's background concerning the violence of customary morality:
Literature
The themes about the person and persona of the mythical noble savage are the subjects of the novel Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, which is the tragic love story between Oroonoko and the beautiful Imoinda, an African king and queen respectively. At Coramantien, Ghana, the protagonist is deceived and delivered into the Atlantic slave trade (16th–19th centuries), and Oroonoko becomes a slave of plantation colonists in Surinam (Dutch Guiana, 1667–1954). In the course of his enslavement, Oroonoko meets the woman who narrates to the reader the life and love of Prince Oroonoko, his enslavement, his leading a slave rebellion against the Dutch planters of Surinam, and his consequent execution by the Dutch colonialists.
Despite Behn having written the popular novel for money, Oroonoko proved to be political-protest literature against slavery, because the story, plot, and characters followed the narrative conventions of the European romance novel. In the event, the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne adapted the novel Oroonoko into the stage play Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1696) that stressed the pathos of the love story, the circumstances, and the characters, which consequently gave political importance to the play and the novel for the candid cultural representation of slave-powered European colonialism.
Uses of the stereotype Romantic primitivism The art historian Erwin Panofsky explains that:
In the novel The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699), in the “Encounter with the Mandurians” (Chapter IX), the theologian François Fénelon presented the noble savage stock character in conversation with civilized men from Europe about possession and ownership of Nature:
In the Kingdom of France, critics of the Crown and Church risked censorship and summary imprisonment without trial, and primitivism was political protest against the repressive imperial règimes of Louis XIV and Louis XV. In his travelogue of North America, the writer Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce de Lahontan, Baron de Lahontan, who had lived with the Huron Indians (Wendat people), ascribed deist and egalitarian politics to Adario, a Canadian Indian who played the role of noble savage for French explorers:
Benjamin Franklin